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Morty knows he shouldn't be screwing around with multidimensional shit. It's dangerous, it's impractical, it's blah blah blah. But it's a potential key to unlimited energy, how does nobody see that? He's built a dimensional siphon (it kind of looks like a cardboard box with a funnel and a TI-84 taped to it, but it damn well works), keyed in the dimensional coordinates to a random plane, and by God he's going to use it.
He flips the switch and waits for the energy bar to fill up.
It does! It fills up very rapidly. Then it explodes, along with the box. There's rather more smoke than there should be, and once the smoke clears someone is standing there.
"Oh dear," Morty says faintly.
Flicker at Whateley
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choice-of-duality
Harry pinches the bridge of his nose. "Would someone like to give an actual answer?"
A Gothy-looking teenager offers, "Don't chaos mages mess up ley lines and stuff?"
"Yes, that does happen. Uncontrolled chaos mages can wreak havoc on the magical energies around them. With training, though, that can go away. Anyone else?"
No one appears to feel the need to contribute.
"Okay. Great."
A Gothy-looking teenager offers, "Don't chaos mages mess up ley lines and stuff?"
"Yes, that does happen. Uncontrolled chaos mages can wreak havoc on the magical energies around them. With training, though, that can go away. Anyone else?"
No one appears to feel the need to contribute.
"Okay. Great."
point_b
Bella takes notes, although this is mostly of the form look up ley lines, look up cultural baggage on chaos magic.
choice-of-duality
Harry turns on a projector, which dutifully spits out a grainy Powerpoint. With a click, the first slide (Chaos Magic!) dissolves into squares and coalesces into the next (What Is That?).
"Chaos magic is, in the most basic terms, a kind of magic that happens purely reflexively. Most mages have to form a mental construct, imbue it with Essence, send it out into the world. Even a high-level WIZ-class mutant still has to form that construct, even if it only takes her a second. A chaos mage has no such restriction; if he wants something, then his magic wants to cooperate."
He clicks through to the next slide, which spins onto the screen. This one reads "Danger!", and bears a charming legend of an unhappy stick figure throwing bolts of lightning at everyone around him. "Obviously, this can be dangerous. Letting your magic do whatever it wants is a recipe for disaster, and so an untrained natural chaos mage is a walking bomb. About sixty percent of WIZ-class mutants with a chaos magic affinity burn out violently in their first year of manifesting, and most take at least one other person with them. And the latter half of that is usually what people remember, which tends to lead to the popular image of the cackling madman waiting to explode."
A girl raises her hand. Harry sighs. "And, of course, the famous supervillains who use chaos magic and give the rest of us a bad name, thank you for the reminder."
"No, um, I just wanted to use the restroom?"
Harry pauses. "Oh. Go ahead, then."
"Chaos magic is, in the most basic terms, a kind of magic that happens purely reflexively. Most mages have to form a mental construct, imbue it with Essence, send it out into the world. Even a high-level WIZ-class mutant still has to form that construct, even if it only takes her a second. A chaos mage has no such restriction; if he wants something, then his magic wants to cooperate."
He clicks through to the next slide, which spins onto the screen. This one reads "Danger!", and bears a charming legend of an unhappy stick figure throwing bolts of lightning at everyone around him. "Obviously, this can be dangerous. Letting your magic do whatever it wants is a recipe for disaster, and so an untrained natural chaos mage is a walking bomb. About sixty percent of WIZ-class mutants with a chaos magic affinity burn out violently in their first year of manifesting, and most take at least one other person with them. And the latter half of that is usually what people remember, which tends to lead to the popular image of the cackling madman waiting to explode."
A girl raises her hand. Harry sighs. "And, of course, the famous supervillains who use chaos magic and give the rest of us a bad name, thank you for the reminder."
"No, um, I just wanted to use the restroom?"
Harry pauses. "Oh. Go ahead, then."
point_b
"Mmhm - I confess that I literally never want anything near me to be struck by lightning outside of extremely narrow circumstances. I would normally consider that an extremely undesirable outcome. Am I unusual or is something else provoking the chaos magic to do things besides what its holder wants?"
choice-of-duality
Harry snorts. "Um. Yeah, no, it's not- that's not the typical use case scenario, 'wow do I ever want lightning to hit this person'. Usually what'd happen is something like a lover's quarrel type thing, you get really angry, you're a teenager, your heart rate goes up, and the magic responds to the emotions rather than the actual intent. Not much different than the usual power-assisted manslaughter, just a bit more common, because it's tied straight into how you feel. That make sense?"
point_b
"Sort of. It makes the magic sound worryingly intelligent, if it 'knows' that violence is a standard response to anger and that lightning is a form of violence, as opposed to responding to increased heart rate by doing the dishes - how smart is it?"
choice-of-duality
"Not all that smart? Magic in general knows from associations, that's kind of a whole thing. So, smart in that way, not so much self-aware. It does things that'd make sense to the person using it, generally. And hurting people we're angry with is a pretty strong instinct for us humans, unfortunately."
choice-of-duality
Harry continues the lesson. Strengths and weaknesses (unpredictability versus inefficiency, respectively), a rundown of historical wielders (apparently including both Bloody Mary and Mary, Queen of Scots- Harry takes a moment to confirm for the class that they were not the same person), and a course outline are all provided.
Eventually, class is over.
Eventually, class is over.
point_b
And Bella tucks her syllabus into her notebook. "So, that was fun," she remarks to Ariel.
in-like-a
"If there's one thing you can count on with Harry, it's that he's fun! I mean, you can also count on him to defeat supervillains, but fun's more important."
point_b
"Question, what form does defeat usually take? Like, do you have to capture them alive, or are supervillains valid targets of lethal violence under some or all circumstances, or what?"
in-like-a
"If the villain's provably killed civilians with no plausible stated recourse, like mind control or a malign symbiote or something, or if you can argue that you fear for your own life, lethal force is authorized but discouraged. In certain cases lethal force is actually encouraged, but that's only for, like, Deathlist or the Troll Bride or somebody really big who routinely escapes captivity. Harry had kind of a high fatality rate when he was active, but that was against some really bad guys, so it's not like he was just charbroiling bank robbers or something."
in-like-a
"There's been kind of a lot of supervillains. Those are both A-listers, though Deathlist's presumed dead on account of Detroit. He was this super murderous cyborg. Carson had a big archnemesis thing with him. Troll Bride's this witch who gains incredible power from devouring the souls of men she marries. She's come back from the dead, like, three times. Still trying to come up with ways to keep her down."
point_b
"I assume denying her marriage licenses is impractical for some reason."
in-like-a
Ariel cracks up.
"I mean, she's Norwegian, so we don't really have the authority. But she's a shapeshifter, so it'd be pretty hard, and I don't know that she needs the licenses anyway. Ceremony's usually more important."
"I mean, she's Norwegian, so we don't really have the authority. But she's a shapeshifter, so it'd be pretty hard, and I don't know that she needs the licenses anyway. Ceremony's usually more important."
point_b
"Is she in disguise? You'd think after she ate two or three souls the population would catch on."
in-like-a
"Shapeshifter. She doesn't really keep to one identity. The only thing she can't shift away is a cow tail, and those can be hidden under skirts easily enough."
point_b
"It is my fondest ambition!" Bella checks her wristy thing to see how her capacity is doing.
in-like-a
Consistent with prior trends! There's enough to futz around magically for a while, or just keep graphing trends.